Posts Tagged ‘news on the March’

Elizabeth Lauten, communications director for Republican Representative Stephen Fincher of Tennessee, had said via a Facebook post that Obama’s daughters, Malia, 16, and Sasha, 13, needed to show “a little class,” complaining they appeared to look disinterested last week during an appearance with their father at a White House pre-Thanksgiving ceremony at which he had “pardoned” a turkey.

A President is representative of the nation’s various strengths and weaknesses. He has great many problems of global magnitude that keep coming to his table every day. As President Truman famously pointed ‘The Buck Stops Here.’ Cannot a Titan carrying the world on his shoulders relax a little? He may even indulge in a bit horseplay at times. Where the humbug and hypocrisy rule and stuffed shirts sit around according to a rigid protocol and speakers haranguing the audience of lost values and yet avoid fulfilling simple obligation like tax, a President must do the honours. If he has to pardon turkeys on a Thanksgiving dinner he is merely entering into the spirit of things which is like ISIS with one voice crying ‘Allahu Akbar‘ while some 30 souls are despatched to kingdom come. Ms. Lauten’s hatchet job was certainly unwanted. Who can expect,for god sake’ two teenagers to fake interest in Presidential pardon to turkeys? To top this she hypocritically prayed many times for guidance before she deleted her ‘rebuke.’ After an insult asking in prayer is an hypocrite’s face saving formula. benny

“A poll released Wednesday of nearly 150,000 people around the world says seven of the world’s 10 countries with the most upbeat attitudes are in Latin America.

Many of the seven do poorly in traditional measures of well-being, like Guatemala, a country torn by decades of civil war followed by waves of gang-driven criminality that give it one of the highest homicide rates in the world. Guatemala sits just above Iraq on the United Nations’ Human Development Index, a composite of life expectancy, education and per capita income. But it ranks seventh in positive emotions.

“In Guatemala, it’s a culture of friendly people who are always smiling,” said Luz Castillo, a 30-year-old surfing instructor. “Despite all the problems that we’re facing, we’re surrounded by natural beauty that lets us get away from it all.”

Gallup Inc. asked about 1,000 people in each of 148 countries last year if they were well-rested, had been treated with respect, smiled or laughed a lot, learned or did something interesting and felt feelings of enjoyment the previous day.

In Panama and Paraguay, 85 percent of those polled said yes to all five, putting those countries at the top of the list. They were followed closely by El Salvador, Venezuela, Trinidad and Tobago, Thailand, Guatemala, the Philippines, Ecuador and Costa Rica.

The people least likely to report positive emotions lived in Singapore, the wealthy and orderly city-state that ranks among the most developed in the world. Other wealthy countries also sat surprisingly low on the list. Germany and France tied with the poor African state of Somaliland for 47th place.

Prosperous nations can be deeply unhappy ones. And poverty-stricken ones are often awash in positivity, or at least a close approximation of it.”

Positive emotions aren’t everything. People living close to Nature is well grounded yes. They are likely to develop more positive emotions than one who has had for Christmas a glock or AR15. What positive emotions can he have unless he goes out and tries it on anything moving? Keep encouraging children ‘Sport! come on try take this to dangerous places, for your own protection’and you will learn soon enough. It shocked me no little to read of the 11 year old boy in Utah taking his weapon to school. When schools have become such lethal place for shoot-outs all I can say American education has become soul-less. Warning signs were there. The warning ‘Why Johnny cannot read’ should have had companion primer like’Why Johnny’s parents cannot read the writing on the wall’. Neglect and wrong parenting methods have reaped their havoc. Parents trusted progress too well to shape the character of their wards. We see their long range consequences now. A child in Gautemala may never see the inside of a school. At least he has unspoilt nature for school. If he is let to build on positive emotions without interference from well meaning busybodies, he may even learn to be happy in life,- living with what little one may call as fruits of ‘progress’.

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The day after the Sandy Hook massacre there was a surge in body armor jackets and guns. I say these people are lemmings. Lemmings I thought were only in cold Arctic regions. No people well pick up the characteristics as naturally as the static on the TV screen of background radiation. (When nature teaches you, what one learns of human nature takes some shape and color.) What do the lemmings teach us? We see the behavior of lemmings in the mindless reaction of people to some events.They respond en masse as a Pavlovian reflex. Progress built up peer pressure and it has made this least attractive trait shape progressive societies. Peer pressure to steel the soul of children to face adversity like an iron spike would have been the ideal. But modern society are in hurry :where not life but status symbols define man’s worth. It translates into ‘keeping up with the Jones’s’ syndrome.In order to be seen successful possess as many cars as your neighbor and so on. It is peer pressure at work. Training children from birth to be natural and self-reliant will not do for the so called city fathers. The young have to conform to peer pressure instead. When one waves flag you gotta wave one or when one beats the drum the rest has to march like robots. No wonder progress has been so badly shown in practice. Does not anyone read Emerson or Thoreau and learn to trust in his or her god-given individuality any more?

A new study finds that chimpanzees and orangutans, too, often experience a mid-life crisis, suggesting the causes are inherent in primate biology and not specific to human society.
“We were just stunned” when data on the apes showed a U-shaped curve of happiness, said economist Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick in England and a co-author of the paper, which was published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.
The U-shaped curve of human happiness and other aspects of well-being are as thoroughly documented as the reasons for it are controversial. Since 2002 studies in some 50 countries have found that well-being is high in youth, plunges in mid-life and rises in old age. The euphoria of youth comes from unlimited hopes and good health, while the contentment and serenity of the elderly likely reflects “accumulated wisdom and the fact that when you’ve seen friends and family die, you value what you have,” said Oswald.
The reasons for the plunge in well-being in middle age, when suicides and use of anti-depressants both peak, are murkier. In recent years researchers have emphasized sociological and economic factors.

Oswald and his colleagues decided to see whether creatures that don’t have career regrets or underwater mortgages might nevertheless suffer a well-being plunge in middle age.
They enlisted colleagues to assess the well-being of 155 chimps in Japanese zoos, 181 in U.S. and Australian zoos and 172 orangs in zoos in the United States, Canada, Australia and Singapore. Keepers, volunteers, researchers and caretakers who knew the apes well used a four-item questionnaire to assess the level of contentment in the animals, said psychologist Alex Weiss of Scotland’s University of Edinburgh. One question, for instance, asked how much pleasure the animals – which ranged from infants to graybeards – get from social interactions.
All three groups of apes experienced mid-life malaise: a U-shaped contentment curve with the nadir at ages 28, 27 and 35, respectively, comparable to human ages of 45 to 50″(Reuters-Nov.19.2012)
In terms of biology life gives each a form. The Chimp has his gait and the one per center his bulging wallet. When the chimp sees you and me knows we are a chump with the same biological functions.Only that they need not deal with progress as we need to. The Chimps do not jump off the Golden Bridge since they know it is a passing phase. On the other hand the modern man has had far greater expectations as a kid. Only these hopes have now come in the bills and bailiffs are out to repossess his all. When pressures of modern life pile up and you have no roof over your head you may even be driven to think of taking extreme steps. Orangs and Chimps have no old age home to look forward to but their social groups keep them survive. Only progress has taken away our social capital and left no crutches to lean on.Don’t ask progress to provide you with a safety net but learn to make one when you can.
benny

Professor Gerald Crabtree, who heads a genetics laboratory at Stanford University in California, has put forward an interesting idea that rather than getting cleverer, human intelligence peaked several thousand years ago and from then on there has been a slow decline in our intellectual and emotional abilities.’
Progress has merely obfuscated the problem. If man were to decide a course to choose with the click of a mouse he may have the whole array of statistics or many options to choose from. It is also a proof of man’s innovative skill. It boils down to this: levels of intelligences can differ qualitatively. A geek who may be socially inept and has emotional blocks can still be a wizard with technology. Our ape ancestor on the other hand required the back up of every other member in his group in order to function as hunter-gatherer. Had there been a test then they would have scored higher on emotional intelligence. The present day nerd uses his brain, which has in ample measure acquired one skill at the expense of other.
This either or choice when we follow from the earliest times has serious consequences for his future development. To come back to the hypothesis of Prof. Crabtree I shall quote from the Independent:

His argument is based on the fact that for more than 99 per cent of human evolutionary history, we have lived as hunter-gatherer communities surviving on our wits, leading to big-brained humans. Since the invention of agriculture and cities, however, natural selection on our intellect has effective stopped and mutations have accumulated in the critical “intelligence” genes.
“I would wager that if an average citizen from Athens of 1000BC were to appear suddenly among us, he or she would be among the brightest and most intellectually alive of our colleagues and companions, with a good memory, a broad range of ideas and a clear-sighted view of important issues,” Professor Crabtree says in a provocative paper published in the journal Trends in Genetics.
“Furthermore, I would guess that he or she would be among the most emotionally stable of our friends and colleagues. I would also make this wager for the ancient inhabitants of Africa, Asia, India or the Americas, of perhaps 2,000 to 6,000 years ago,” Professor Crabtree says.
“The basis for my wager comes from new developments in genetics, anthropology, and neurobiology that make a clear prediction that our intellectual and emotional abilities are genetically surprisingly fragile,” he says.
A comparison of the genomes of parents and children has revealed that on average there are between 25 and 65 new mutations occurring in the DNA of each generation. Professor Crabtree says that this analysis predicts about 5,000 new mutations in the past 120 generations, which covers a span of about 3,000 years.((www.independent.co.uk/news/science/human-intelligence-peaked-thousands-of-years-ago-and-weve-been-on-an-intellectual-and-emotional-decline-ever-since-8307101.html steve connor of 12 Nov, 2012)

The brain is a wonderful piece of assembly with which man assembles myriad jumble of information and can group them into sets for later use. While he is engaged in any work his attention may be focused on the work on hand to which his memory comes to assist with amazing speed. His abstraction however is subservient to the immediate need of the moment. His physiology has come to sense what is needed and also comes to rescue. Thus in a savanna when faced with imminent danger his train of thoughts may be broken in the mid-air. It is not the thoughts of the fireside social meal with his cronies of previous night but of the vital split moment’s decision. ‘Do I stand and fight it or flee?’ the thought has already taken his whole body. Adrenaline pumps to his legs impressing on him with added impetus to run away or stand up resolute. The brain can only do what is needful primed by his physiology. Progress merely gave him a tool and said,’Don’t think but at the click of a mouse I shall give information.It was how ORCA system that Mitt Romney counted on to give him up-to-date info and control over voting pattern, folded up miserably. Those who were put in charge of GOTV program were left without plan B. Moral of this is that brain is meant to be used and not leave one aspect of intelligence say social intelligence to another to play with.
Nerds are also people but for a sane world and for the emotional inputs that may work healing even an infant has more to offer.
benny

Recent US elections showed the folly of relying on technology. Mitt Romney’s campaign had hatched a highly secret weapon to track and control voting pattern on the election day.
In the week leading up to the election, Romney campaign spokesperson Andrea Saul told Business Insider that ORCA was “the Republican Party’s newest, most technologically advanced plan to win the 2012 election,” touting it as the game-changer that would blow even the Obama campaign’s sophisticated GOTV system out of the water.
Urging the electorate Go To Vote(GOTV) is one thing and to let technology take over the command is yet another. The folly of relying on technology to replace the age old human social interactions is no more starkly illustrated than in this occasion. Romney who hoped to change the political landscape showed his hand here.
“Their priorities were so screwed up — [they were] hypersensitive about information security, but also wanted to use the best technology they could,” the strategist continued. “In the end they got neither. They put out a laughable GOTV product.”
As a result there ensued a massive organizational failure that resulted in lower Republican turnout than even John McCain got in 2008.
A major source of Romney’s GOTV problems appears to have been the disastrous Project ORCA, an expensive technological undertaking that was supposed to provide the campaign with real-time poll monitoring that would allow Republicans to target GOTV efforts on Election Day.

To quote the Business Insider,:
It appears that in its singular focus on competing technologically with the Obama campaign, the Romney team neglected to adequately account for and organize the essential human element necessary to any grassroots undertaking. Thus when its technological efforts failed, the campaign was left without a Plan B, and its volunteers were forced to fly blind at the moment the campaign needed them most.
“I think sometimes people get enamored of technology and they take people out of the mixture because its easier,” Republican strategist Dave Carney told Business Insider.
When we equate progress with our advances in technology we ought to remember we cannot leave the essential component of building up interpersonal relationships to an impersonal program or technology in its narrowest sense. Reading sometime ago of corporate heads firing employees through emails made me think how far we had fallen short from the true objective of progress.
Progress as the fellow said, is a human thing and it ought not let technology rob its sweetness.
(Insiders Explain How Mitt Romney’s Campaign Completely Fell Apart On Election Day
By Grace Wyler | Business Insider of Nove.12,2012)
benny

Disk galaxies like our own Milky Way put the finishing touches on their stunning shapes relatively recently, a new study suggests.
The find will likely surprise many scientists, who had thought such galaxies had been static for more than half of the universe’s 13.7-billion-year existence.
“Astronomers thought disk galaxies in the nearby universe had settled into their present form by about eight billion years ago, with little additional development since,” lead author Susan Kassin, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in a statement. “The trend we’ve observed instead shows the opposite — that galaxies were steadily changing over this time period.”Kassin and her colleagues used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck Observatory in Hawaii to study 544 blue galaxies, whose color indicates that stars are forming within them.
They found that the most far-flung, ancient galaxies tend to be the most disordered, with organization steadily increasing as galaxies are observed closer and closer to the present day. Over time, the galaxies’ rotation speeds increase, and they settle into proper, well-behaved disks.
The trend holds for galaxies of all masses, but the biggest systems are always the most highly organized, researchers said.(ack:space.com of Oct 23, 2012/Galaxy Evolution surprises Scientists)

it is a law of Nature that unless certain force acts on an object say an apple, it will tend to a certain disorder over a period of time. An apple rots away and the luscious fruit has become unpalatable. Law of entropy is a matter for our universe and physical world. How does a galaxy organizes itself unless there is an external agency works with every component that makes it up. If I as a Christian should claim it is God by his very nature of Love who shall disprove me?

Georgia Rep. Paul Broun said in videotaped remarks that evolution, embryology and the Big Bang theory are “lies straight from the pit of hell” meant to convince people that they do not need a savior.
The Republican lawmaker made those comments during a speech Sept. 27 at a sportsman’s banquet at Liberty Baptist Church in Hartwell. Broun, a medical doctor, is running for re-election in November unopposed by Democrats.
“God’s word is true,” Broun said, according to a video posted on the church’s website. “I’ve come to understand that. All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell. And it’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who are taught that from understanding that they need a savior.”
The congressman has definite views about God and His role, just as a Republican congressman he has the agenda of his party. He shall strive diligently as true Republican for the unfair distribution of wealth where the poor have none to blame but themselves that they remain poor. On the other hand the rich holds all the initiative to corner the wealth of nation for their own will and pleasure. Perhaps he also implies God has set him to keep that inequality?
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Why should we need to be certain God exists or that God is dead?

What are the credentials of humans to speak of a divine Being, God, after-life or creation time or Big Bang?
We are holding a middle state unable to trace the largest circle except that one can imagine ;for that matter can we see the inside of an atom with our naked eye? Recently scientists were speaking of theory of something where the energy was borrowed instead of the conventional wisdom that energy is neither created nor destroyed. There is also a shift in our concept of the Big Bang that our universe was ‘seeded’ by dark matter to give it a beginning of sorts. Science shall indeed make great strides.Consequently our ideas also shall shift.
There would not be scientific enquiry had not man felt some inner compulsion to know the truth. Look at our physical being. We are subject to wear and tear of age and dissolution at death. It is the truth. This is what law of entropy speaks and it marks specific time. But at our atomic level there is no dissolution! Would that mean we are timeless at one end of of our being?Can one be true and the other a lie?
We are foolish to think we can think our way out since thinking of one idea can only be limited by another idea and so on. Creation of the earth by God, the concept of Big Bang followed by something else. It could go on. The wisest of us who think intellect is all there is to it are as misguided as those who think their body is above all.
As humans let us not think of writing a thesis when we are in the nursery here on earth. Because of circumstances of my birth and upbringing I see the key that holds my moral universe as God. My keen interest in history, literature arts and science do not in any manner cloud or diminish my faith. Since as a morally responsible person it is the oxygen so my art, architecture( I am an architect by profession), stories, writings all permeated by moral sense. The bottom line is that I am an individual. Also morally responsible.
I consider these controversies of God as merely fool’s business to avoid from doing what is needful.
Le us show ourselves as a good human being, as father, mother daughter,son,citizen rather than wasting our lives in useless arguments.
Let us instead get back to paying our mortgages and looking what shall we set on the dinner table for the day.
benny